Rapid Application Development

Published July 22, 2015 by
Paul Lefebvre

Although not a new trend in software development, rapid application development (RAD for short) is again on the upswing. What is RAD? It’s all about creating software quickly. The technology world isalways changing rapidly and change only seems to accelerate. Being able to create your own software and easily adapt to changes is incredibly important to nearly every business.

To that end, more companies are wondering how they can improve the speed of their development. A large IT department can take months (or years) to write specifications, design architectures, develop, test and ship. It can sometimes be too much for the organization to sustain; and for some types of apps, it may be overkill.

One solution is to look at having smaller teams that work with RAD tools to create smaller, focused apps more quickly.

As it turns out, a tool like Xojo is a great match for companies looking to go to RAD.

Lots Of App Types

Odds are your app needs are going to span multiple platforms. Web application is a great way to easily distribute apps. Desktop apps are a necessity for speed and functionality. And there are more mobile devices in use than anything else. Why are you using separate tools to target all these platforms? Xojo can create apps for all these platforms.

Desktop Apps

Xojo has been creating desktop apps since 1998. These days, Xojo can create desktop apps for Windows, OS X and even Linux- all from the same source code! As more companies are starting to use OS X and Linux, having a tool for creating apps that can be used by everyone in your company can significantly save on costs.

Xojo desktop apps are native apps, compiled down to machine code. That means there are no other frameworks that need to be installed, making them easy to deploy.

Your development team can take advantage of Xojoâs object-oriented programming language and UI designer to create apps faster than you ever though possible. I often like to tell people you’ll have Xojo downloaded, installed and your first app created before you finishing installing other tools. Heck, Visual Studio 2015 is over 27GB!

Web Apps

Since 2010, Xojo also has been able to create web applications. But Xojo doesnât create simple HTML-based web apps. Xojo web apps are asynchronous and use a JavaScript framework, making it incredibly simple for you to create web apps that look and function like desktop apps. And you wonât have to learn a bunch of different and unrelated web app technologies. Xojo handles it all, but is not locked down so you can also interface to other JavaScript libraries if you want.

And to make deployment as simple as a single click, sign up forXojo Cloud web hosting to get fully managed, secure web app hosting as well as Xojo apps and MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

iOS Apps

Xojo’s newest suported platform is iOS. In fact, Xojo might be the easiest way to create iOS apps. The layout editor and event-based programming model make creating iOS apps easier than ever. Of course, Xojo creates native, 64-bit iOS that are ready for distribution in the App Store, Enterprise Deployment or any of theother options provided by Apple.

Industrial-Strength

Xojo also has support for the things that are important for quality software development: